Navin Dhanuka

Apple, Netflix and other streaming services explored the possibility of acquiring “No Time to Die,” the upcoming James Bond movie that was originally slated to debut last April. The film’s release has been postponed multiple times, with the Daniel Craig vehicle moving back to November before being pushed into 2021 as the number of coronavirus cases kept growing.

MGM, the studio behind the film, reportedly lost between $30 million to $50 million due to the delays, insiders said. Bloomberg first reported the discussions, which have been the topic du jour in Hollywood this week. Other studios, such as Paramount and Sony, have raked in tens of millions by selling movies like “Greyhound,” “Coming 2 America” and “Without Remorse” to streaming services while the exhibition sector continues to struggle during the pandemic.

“We do not comment on rumors. The film is not for sale. The film’s release has been postponed until April 2021 in order to preserve the theatrical experience for moviegoers,” an MGM spokesperson told Variety.

However, multiple insiders at rival studios and companies said that a possible Bond sale was explored overtly, and believe that MGM was at least open to the possibility of unloading their crown jewel for a princely sum. The studio was said to be looking for a deal of roughly $600 million — a price tag that was deemed too rich for two of the free-spending streaming services. A sale of this magnitude would be led exclusively by Kevin Ulrich, the chairman and CEO of MGM’s majority owner Anchorage Capital Group, insiders said.

It’s unclear if producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, who exert control of the series through their company Eon, would sign off on the deal. Universal Pictures, which has foreign distribution rights to “No Time to Die,” would have to be made whole in any possible sale and reimbursed for any expenses the studio incurred. That the parties involved would explore a streaming sale is notable, given that the film was the first tentpole to move release dates before coronavirus was upgraded to a global pandemic — making it an early indicator that even the iconic spy and ladies man would not save us from the viral event.

Moving “No Time to Die” to a streaming service poses some logistical challenges. The film costs more than $250 million to produce and has lined up several promotional partnerships to help defray those costs — including Land Rover, Omega watches and Heineken. Those companies may have been expecting the film to hit theaters and might not be thrilled with a streaming-only bow. “Coming 2 America’s” sale to Amazon, for instance, was contingent on making sure that its promotional partners, McDonald’s and Crown Royal, were on board with the change in plans.

Source: Variety.com & Slashdot.org

YouTube ads will be popping up more and more as we move into 2021.

The company announced on its blog recently that it has revised its terms of service to allow ads to appear on video channels that are not part of the YouTube Partner Program — a program that allows the owner of a channel to generate revenue by attaching ads to his/her video content. Previously, only creators with more than 1,000 subscribers were able to join the program, and any videos from creators who dipped below that threshold did not have ads. But that’s all changed now. Ads will be automatically added to all videos regardless of whether creators decide to be a part of the program — Those who are not part of the partner program, however, will not be receiving revenue for ads shown. Sources suggest that this move is a strategy aimed to draw in more users on YouTube, increase ad revenue and encourage users to subscribe to YouTube’s monthly subscription service YouTube Premium.

YouTube’s new policy will take immediate effect in the U.S., followed by other regions next year.

Source: HypeBeast.com

Seemingly at first thinking it was just an April Fools’ Day joke, but it turns out the GNU Guix developers responsible for their package manager and operating system are actually working to replace their Linux (GNU Linux-libre to be exact) kernel with GNU Hurd.

The GNU Guix project announced today they are planning to deprecate support for the Linux kernel. Their Guix 1.1 target would be the last supporting Linux-libre and by Guix 2.0 they would potentially be removing their Linux kernel entirely but still allowing “foreign” distributions to support it on a best-effort basis.

They want GNU Hurd to “increase security and freedom for their users.” Though GNU Hurd still doesn’t run on much of today’s hardware. Hurd still lacks in the area of 64-bit and SMP capabilities not to mention all of the other newer hardware features and device support. Hurd can basically be spun up for a basic virtual machine but isn’t too practical beyond that but it fits the GNU principles on freedom.

GNU Guix defaulting to Hurd would be one of the few open-source projects doing so, with the unofficial Debian GNU/Hurd being another.

Thinking it may have just been an elaborate April Fools’ Day joke, but there is actually the Guix’s wip-hurd and wip-hurd-vm branches where this work is happening to promote Hurd within the Guix ecosystem.

Source: Phoronix.com

Competing with Google and other Big Tech companies seems like a tall order: their monopolistic market power, platform effects and army of highly paid developers are generally considered too powerful to tackle for anyone but other tech giants such as Facebook or Amazon. Our story shows that it doesn’t have to be that way — you can beat Big Tech by focussing on privacy. Consider Google reCAPTCHA, which consumes enormous amounts of behavioral data to determine whether web users are legitimate humans or bots. At hCaptcha, we have deliberately taken a very different approach, using privacy-preserving machine learning techniques to identify typical bot behaviors at high accuracy, all while consuming and storing as little data as possible.

Google is an ad company, and their security products look very much like their ad products: they track user behavior on every page of a website and across the web. We designed hCaptcha to be as privacy-friendly as possible from day one. This led to a completely different approach to the problem. As it turns out, tracking users across the web and tying their web history to their identity is completely unnecessary for achieving good security. The many companies that have switched over to hCaptcha often report equal or better performance in bot detection and mitigation despite our privacy focus.

A growing number of critics have pointed out that Google’s disregard for user privacy should concern customers looking to protect their websites and apps. At the same time, stopping bots from accessing publisher sites can reveal ad fraud, pitting Google’s reCAPTCHA product directly against their ad business, which produces over 80% of their revenue. Every bot Google detects should be earning zero ad dollars. Google’s company incentives are thus poorly aligned with the users of their security services, and this may be one explanation for the poor performance of their reCAPTCHA security offering.

More: SlashDot.org & hCapthca.com

Read It @ Medium.com

If you are interested in pursuing a career in development and don’t know where to start, here’s your go-to guide for salaries, skills, and the best programming languages to learn.

Developers are among the most highly sought-after tech professionals in the workforce, with increased demand and talent shortages leading to large salaries for many of those in the field. That said, software development is a dynamic field, in which new programming languages, frameworks, and technologies may live and die within a few years, and job needs are constantly shifting.

Why is there increased demand for developers?

Every company has become a tech company to some degree, with digital transformation projects underway in most industries to stave off disruption. This means that demand for developer talent has skyrocketed in recent years, as companies seek people who can bring digital projects and applications to life.

Front-end developers, full stack developers, mobile developers, and back-end developers are among the top 10 hardest to fill tech jobs, according to data from Indeed.

Meanwhile, the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics predicts that software developer jobs will grow 24% between 2016 and 2026–much faster than the average rate of other professions, the bureau noted. Application developer jobs are projected to grow 31% in that time, and systems developers are forecast to grow 11%.

What are some developer job roles?

Developers can take a number of different career paths. Here are a few roles in the field.

• Mobile developer: Builds apps for mobile devices, including iOS and Android. A mobile developer might use Java, Swift, and Objective-C.
• Full stack developer: Is able to work on both the front-end and back-end portions of an application or website. A full stack developer has specialized knowledge of all stages of software development, including server, network, and hosting environment; relational and nonrelational databases; interacting with APIs; user interface and user experience; quality assurance; security; customer and business needs.
• Front-end developer: Builds websites by converting data to a graphical interface for the user to view and interact with, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Back-end developer: Builds the functionality and interactivity of a website, including the elements that allow users to carry out actions like logging in, creating an account, and liking posts. Depending on what you want your web app to do, you might learn languages including Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP.

Read More @ TechRepublic.com